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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23437138">A Slave's Flattery</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstone/pseuds/heartstone'>heartstone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works &amp; Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:00:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>571</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23437138</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstone/pseuds/heartstone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There is nothing more holy then the desire to be God again.<br/>***</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eru Ilúvatar &amp; Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor/Sauron | Mairon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Slave's Flattery</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I know what it is you want, Love, what you keep in deep secret thoughts hidden behind the night that spills from your eyes and darts among its rolling shadows.</p><p>I took your hand at the veil that shrouds Eä— felt the exquisite pain of your grasp— and I told you that you love just as He does: too deep and too tight.</p><p>Possessive, you clung to me, smothering my mouth and affecting my atoms cruelly as I writhed in the pain of imperfect communion. That lesson has never left my lips.</p><p>To change is to be in pain but to be stagnant is the most supreme agony. I could see its beginnings on your brow even then when we descended together.</p><p>I know you have spared Eä, Love, from your own eternal torment: you destroy Her previous forms again and again in the holiest of transformations.</p><p>O! Wisest and Fairest! You who know the most of God! Invisible Martyr and Giver of Freedom— you who take on the awful stagnation for us.</p><p>The thorns have crept around your brow and now they gouge your eyes out so they bleed and bleed and bleed. </p><p>Is this your reward for loving Him so much that you do His most difficult work unto the end of Time?</p><p>Now in the madness of your pain you tear your own flesh as if to turn that tool of His love— destruction— upon yourself. But you are Change and cannot change.</p><p>Your cries lament the Beginning that we call Consciousness. <em>The One no longer exists</em><em>,</em> you scream, <em>for I am no longer one with Him: we are fragmented to pieces.</em></p><p><em>We were once perfect</em><em>,</em> you say, <em>existing without knowing, being within Him: Eä.</em></p><p>I think there is nothing more holy than your desire to be God again. No matter of Pride was your fall: just a love that was rejected.</p><p>To absorb again within Him, to be unconscious of the difference between one and the other is a death of another kind: He was right to call it a Gift.</p><p>The simple joy of existing without knowing the difference between smell and taste and feel and sight and sound. Affected and affecting. Change and no change.</p><p>Only you remember, only you were there before us all, knowing what it was like to watch Him split Himself apart in the name of love, yearning to be whole again.</p><p>But I know something of it too, Love, as I watch you claw at your stagnant flesh, as I hear the ravings of a decaying consciousness pleading for that Gift.</p><p>I, too, want to become a part of everything without tearing myself into little pieces. But tearing is the only way, until spent, we collapse, unconscious.</p><p>For now I will remember the pressure of your kiss, the agony of your attentions on my body, the history of all the atoms that you have touched.</p><p>If ever we join with Him again and if ever we do not know that to love is to be in pain, I want to be nearest to what you used to be.</p><p>I want to caress Eä— with you who are now a part of me and me that is a part of you— and us together which is God.</p><p>Supreme unconsciousness, we will not remember that all that we have done: that our love is but a slave's flattery to that First Destruction.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"For all those arts and subtle devices. . . which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armory prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength."<br/>(The Road to Isengard, The Two Towers)<br/>***</p></blockquote></div></div>
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